A 1.8 V, 10 Gbps fully integrated CMOS optical receiver analog front end

Abstract

A fully integrated 10 Gbps optical receiver analog front-end (AFE), includes a trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) and a limiting amplifier (LA), is fabricated using a 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. The receiver front-end provides a conversion gain up to 85 dB/spl Omega/ and -3 dB bandwidth of 7.6 GHz. The sensitivity of the optical receiver is -13 dBm at a bit-error rate of 10/sup -12/ with 2/sup 31/-1 pseudo-random bits. 3D symmetric transformers are utilized in the AFE design for bandwidth enhancement.